Great Kisser (26 page)

In 1944, Oscar was 17 years old and weighed 60 pounds. Weeks before the end of the war, the Nazi commandant in the Hamburg prison told the Jews they were not going to work the next day: “I'm sending you to Sweden.” Oscar thought, sure, I know what that means. At five o'clock the Jews gathered in the plaza, waiting to be gassed. The Nazis grabbed the Jews and marched them to an area of dead bodies. One of the bodies was moving, and one of the SS shouted, “You lousy pig. You're still moving.”

Oscar and the other Jews had to undress the corpses, take off the zebra clothes they had been wearing, and put on the civilian clothes of the corpses. The commandant said, “I can't send you to Sweden in prison clothes.” An hour later big trucks arrived with Red Cross signs painted on them. The doors opened and Swedish nurses in white uniforms appeared and walked up to the Jews. A nurse said to Oscar, “
Guten tag, mein kind
. Please come inside and sit down. We'll give you some coffee and breakfast.”

The Jews thought it was a trick and didn't move. The Nazi guards beat them with clubs, screaming “Get into the trucks.” Oscar and the other Jews entered the trucks as if they were entering a dream. They were fed, taken to the station and placed on a train. The next thing Oscar remembered was arriving at Malmo in Sweden, seeing the Israeli flag, and singing the Jewish national anthem, “Hatikvah.”

Later, Oscar learned that Count Bernadotte had glimpsed a group of Jewish prisoners from afar, who he thought were women, and offered the Nazis money to free 1,000 of them. Oscar was one of these prisoners.

Oscar Schwartz interviewed me five times before he hired me. He spoke in a faltering, hesitant English, a decent education having been denied him by his fate. After the liberation he had given his brother the chance for an education. Oscar felt about himself that he was a little man who spoke inadequately with a slight Yiddish accent. He could have been a merchant in a store on the lower East Side, which in fact he had been. But now he was rich. His emotions were like pebbles in a dry creek.

He could not make up his mind about me. He suggested I travel with him to Riga, Latvia for a conference of camp survivors. “I'll pay all the expenses,” he said. “And then we'll see what's what.” I wiggled out of this tempting offer.

He had been betrayed by another writer. Henninger! Heinrich Henninger, the German scholar and foremost expert on Latvia. Henninger with his entourage of pretty secretaries in Germany, his walking stick and monocle, his insistence on first class accommodations. Henninger the specialist on anti-Semitism and Nazism—the Good German—had taken a hundred thousand dollars from Schwartz and not written a word. Henninger had tortured him, pleading for more and more time to do his research so the result would be perfect: “Herr Schwartz, I am not a worker in a sausage factory! I and my sweet girls are doing scientific research for you in every crevice of the world.” Henninger, who kept sending him new bills, asking for more and more: “Better, ampler provisions, please! You are turning me into a beggar and a whipping boy!” Until Schwartz could stand it no more, he'd be dead by the time Henninger began to write—23 members of Schwartz's Latvia Survivor Committee had already died since the contract was signed.

Schwartz had gone to Germany and picketed in front of the Bundestag in his concentration camp uniform and handed out leaflets about Henninger's betrayal with a picture of Henninger in tux and tails and a bevy of his girls. Schwartz had placed an X over the picture and written over it, “The New Goering!” Schwartz picketed every day, attracted the press and smoked Henning out. Until Henninger actually gave himself away in a fit of exasperation and told the reporters, “These Jews keep pestering me with their machinations.”

Schwartz took Henninger to court and got his money back.

There were thousands of Holocaust accounts by survivors, mostly unread, unwanted and unknown. The rich survivors, like Schwartz, could publish them for their families in vanity editions. But Schwartz was not vain. And I began to question whether he even wanted to publish his book.

On the day he finally hired me, he said at the end, “I would like to introduce you to Mother.” He took me outside the house down a winding path and arbor to an adjoining building. “
Mutti
,” he called. We entered a sun-dappled room. A tiny, frail, bald, doll-like woman dressed in a red velvet frock sat on a chair, a female attendant beside her. Schwartz stood gazing at her with a tender smile. “Oscar, have you eaten a decent lunch?” She said. “You're skinny as a rail.”

“Yes,
Mutti
. I'm fine,” he said softly.

She turned to me. “Another aktion tonight. Be ready.”

Oscar would crawl out under the barbed wire fence to get into town to steal food. Returning to camp, he saved up little bites of bread hidden in a small handkerchief for his mother, and threw them over the fence to her. But at night, his friend would appear: Oscar's mother had sent back double the pieces of bread to him. She had not eaten at all.

Now we faced each other on the couch and began our work, my arm creeping up around the back of his chair protectively, holding him but not touching him. To avoid making a mistake with Schwartz would have necessitated residing inside his skin, to understand his criticism of me that began, “Something is not right … I don't know exactly,” and ended, “It's not the proper way, that's all I can tell you.” He threw up his hands. “I can't help it; that's the way I am.” He giggled. “I'm the person who decides.” Translated from the Yiddish, that meant, “I'm the one with the money.”

He felt strangled by what was inside him, how to say it so that he would be understood. To warm himself up, Schwartz suggested we first listen to the tapes he had collected of other survivors telling their stories. He watched my reactions. If I was moved by one of the accounts, he was jealous. “I know him,” Oscar said of one survivor. “You shouldn't believe everything you hear. He's not a hundred percent, that's all I can tell you, he's not so hotsie-totsie.”

I dreaded going to see him each day like going to prison, fighting sleep and exhaustion when sitting next to him for ten hours, not allowed by him to even leave the room and walk around the garden and fields without alarming him.

So how come, starting out of need and hunger, I came to love Oscar Schwartz?

Very slowly, Schwartz began to talk to me. The first thing he ever told me was of the wedding he took part in weeks after liberation. It was the wedding of a couple from the camp. The bridesmaids were also women from the camp—“dressed in evening dresses,” Isaac said. “Bald, short, tall.”

He shook his head. He moved his hands to express what he could not.

“And,” Oscar added, “There was an Israeli soldier with the star of David.”

“I remember at first in Cologne,” he said, “being dazzled by all the yellow stars.”

Oscar and his brother Nathan cracked lice off each other's bodies for hours at night in the barracks of the Kaiserwald camp. They were quartered three men to a bunk eighteen inches high, six feet long and less than five feet wide. It was bitter cold and the slats were covered with ice. Other Jews were taken to Salispils, where they were ordered to construct barracks. Until the barracks were built, they slept outdoors in the snow. Until they were dead.

This was during the period of Sinatra wowing the screaming bobby-soxers at the Paramount, Durante signing off to Mrs. Calabash, Eddie Cantor signing off every Sunday, “I love to spend each Sunday with you” and Bob Hope with “Thanks for the Memory.” Hollywood's golden age of comedy, of Preston Sturges, Katharine Hepburn, Frank Capra, Betty Grable, Crawford and Gable in
It Happened One Night
. Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn and Samuel Goldwyn and Irving Thalberg ruled the studios, America! America! how the Jews flourished, Einstein, Freud, the Marx Brothers, Ted Lewis, Mel Torme, Bess Meyerson, Clifford Odets, Alfred Kazin, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Irwin Shaw, A. J. Liebling, Jerry Lewis, Jennie Grossinger, Danny Kaye, that publishing mammoth the
New York Times
so sedate about the Holocaust, so embarrassed, much like my father: “Don't talk about it, don't stir things up”—the disemboweled, denied Jews on stage and screen and radio: Joe Keller in
All My Sons
, Willy Loman in
Death of a Salesman
, Lillian Hellman's Southern family, Papa David on radio's soap opera “Life Can Be Beautiful,” he's a treasure trove of wisdom, but who is Papa David, is that sweet European accent Austrian? German? It ain't Yiddish but what is it??? That's gotta be a Jew! It's a secret. Only Winchell, prince of sleaze, talked about the Nazis Sunday nights 9
P.M.
to Mister and Mrs. North America, ships at sea, as did the feisty Jolson—and Ben Hecht and Meyer Levin, who were labeled ranting lunatics. In American movie theaters news of the war was contained in the four-minute newsreels between movies and stage shows with trapeze artists, acrobats, tap dancers, singers, comics—newsreels narrated by a deep-throated actor conveying the gravity of the situation, even grainy unreal five-second shots of the camps, but full of optimism and uplift too.

Five hundred prisoners lay beside each other in Kaiserwald on straw mattresses under blankets of dried-up excrement and pus, and when one turned over, 499 others had to do the same. The stinking smell of five hundred bodies, one toilet. You had to get permission, risking a beating or death, to use it. When someone overhead had diarrhea, the shit leaked down on those in the bunks below.

Herding the Jews at 4:30 for roll call in the freezing cold of ten below, some without shoes (they wore bandages on their feet) and all forced to wear light clothing deliberately the wrong size, hah hah hah. Oh what fun Mister X (his real name was Xavier Apel) had. Mister X had been imprisoned in Germany for murder; the Nazis plucked him out and gave him a seat of honor in charge of Kaiserwald. Even in camp he wore custom-made, tailored clothes. If he didn't like your nose, or you forgot to take your hat, your
hutte
, off at the sight of him, that was the end of you. What fun with the
huttes
: “
Huttes
on!
Huttes
off! On! Off! Off! On!” he shouted for hours, and if you got it wrong, put your
hutte
on when it should be off, or you didn't have time to take it off because you'd just put it on, he threw you in the latrine and let you drown in it. Or shot you in the eyes or the groin or the stomach. An inmate who had contacted dysentery gave away his food. Mister X heard of this crime and threw the inmate into a large kettle of boiling water, intended for preparing coffee for the prisoners. The man was scalded to death, and the coffee was prepared for the Jews from this water.

“My brother and I used to sit and watch birds flying away,” Oscar told me. “And we would think, ‘If I could be a bird and just fly out from here.' How we envied the birds for being able to do that.”

I tried to imagine him—this old man at 13 when the war broke out, fearless, crawling out under the barbed wire fence to get food for himself, his mother, his brother, his aunt, his niece, his old heder teacher Zambach. Zambach had traveled to Palestine in 1937 and told the class of seeing Jewish policemen on white horses! Why had he come back? Zambach, who, like Marta, would stand by the front gate, but as if by chance, not wanting to beg, hoping Oscar would notice him and give him food. Oscar knew.

The Jews were fed fish heads, one slice of bread, and potato peels each day; they starved if they could not steal. The old people were goners. Oscar, who as a young kid before the Nazis were there had sailed down the hill in Cologne on his bicycle without holding on to the handlebars, in Riga stole the Nazis' felt boots and even wore them out in the open, driving his mother crazy with anxiety. He was always outsmarting the Nazis. He had youth on his side; there was a brio to what he did. In the green days of his youth, in the black smoke and ashes of the ghetto. He carried around hand grenades in his pockets; his mother made him throw them away.

In Cologne you wore the star, and it was dangerous to go outside. You couldn't walk on the sidewalk, you couldn't shop in the stores, you couldn't mail a letter. Even if you followed every rule, they would shoot you or torture you for the fun of it. Every morning and night, Oscar had to report to the police station and state, “I am the Jew, Oscar Schwartz.” They would mark it down in a book and say, “Get out, you damn Jew,” or give him a beating. They were having so much fun, seldom have people experienced so many delicious highs. They would have fathers and sons punch each other in the face, and if they didn't do it fiercely enough, they showed them how it was done properly. They would solemnly measure a Jew's nose, or hands, or mouth, record the measurements sternly in a book, take hours doing it, laugh, tear up the paper and shoot the Jew. When they deported the Jews from Cologne, they would have them write down carefully every teacup, chair, fork and spoon and knife, every item of furniture as if they would be preserving them for the Jews' return. The idea was to reassure the Jews and avoid disorder, but if the mood overtook them, they just tore up those lists too, howling, and threw them on the floor.

But Oscar had defied them. He wanted to see the anti-Semitic film
Jew Suss
, a bastardized version of Leon Feuchtwanger's novel, he had to see it. He went to another part of town, took off his star, and lined up in the queue for the film. People joked about Jews: “It smells like onions; there must be a Jew somewhere.” Oscar joined right in: “Yeah, you're right. It smells like garlic, and boy do Jews love garlic.” And they laughed. “And I was very proud of myself, because in the back of my mind I thought, if they only knew who I was.”

And he went inside the theater and saw the film. It made him cringe, but later it made him stronger. “I realized that everything they said about Jews was a lie,” Oscar told me. “There had been a time when I'd wished I was not Jewish. The film made me feel much more for my fellow Jews, the injustice of what was done to them. But it aroused other feelings in me too. The torrent of hate made me question my own grasp of reality. Could these terrible things they were saying about Jews be actually true? How could everyone else be wrong and a small minority of Jews be right?”